The 3 Traits of Great Teachers
What makes certain teachers so magical? What qualities should we look for, and what ones should we ignore?
In the last month we’ve seen a provocative new wave of reporting and research on that old and important mystery, from Elizabeth Bennett (New York Times Magazine), Amanda Ripley (Atlantic), and two terrific new books, Teaching as Leadership, by Steven Farr, and Teach Like a Champion, by Doug Lemov.
You should check out the stories and accompanying videos for yourself, but here’s the key point: great teachers share certain signature traits. Some of these traits are no big surprise — for instance, great teachers don’t see mistakes as verdicts, but as opportunities for learning; great teachers are immensely skillful at “holding the floor;” i.e. managing attention. Others are a bit more surprising.
- Trait 1: They set big, ambitious, highly specific goals.
The key word here is specific, as in “my students will progress 1.5 grade levels this year” or, in the case of basketball, “our team will score an average of 50 points a game.” Great teachers are constantly looking for vivid, trackable measuring sticks — which, by the way, are frequently creative (for instance, an orchestra could track the number of pieces it plays perfectly).
That sounds rather obvious, but the real art is in setting the right goal, making it visceral, and using it as a type of powerful magnet, orienting the mindsets, aspirations, and identity of the group. Above all, the goal is to avoid not having any. As Farr writes, vague goals are a kind of motivational smog, dimming expectation and achievement. Great teachers are allergic to vagueness.
- Trait 2: Great teachers are constantly revising themselves.
They see their own work as never quite good enough. Behind the scenes, they tear up old lesson plans and draw new ones. In addition, they are magpies, stealing good ideas from fellow teachers, borrowing techniques, relentlessly upgrading their game. This finding seems strange, until you think of them as engaged in constructive editing. Like any good business or athlete, they are involved in an internal kaizen process, always looking hard at results, finding tiny ways to improve. They’re obsessed with honing their neural circuitry.
- Trait 3: Great teachers radiate satisfaction with their lives.
They simply love teaching — a finding which seems warm and cuddly until you consider the hard numbers: according to a study in the Journal of Positive Psychology cited by Ripley, teachers who scored high in life satisfaction were 43 percent more likely to perform well in the classroom than their less satisfied colleagues. Their zeal is not coincidental; it fuels the work of the job, allowing them to reach out again and again, engaging students.
It’s also interesting to note what qualities are not on this list — namely that Dead Poets’ Society, leap-on-the-desk quality known as charisma — which doesn’t turn out to be nearly as valuable we might instinctively suppose. (Ripley’s article contains a scene of two aspiring teachers competing for a job with Teach For America; one is charismatic and charming; the other quiet and prepared. Guess who gets the job?)
The lesson: sorry, Robin Williams. While the desk-leaping sizzle of your charisma is hugely enjoyable, it’s useful only when paired with the thick, juicy steak of real educational skills.
And the Oscar Goes to…
Ah, Oscar Week. Over the next six days we’ll witness people praising the visionary talent of best-director co-favorites James Cameron (”Avatar”) and Kathryn Bigelow (”The Hurt Locker”). We’ll hear about Cameron and Bigelow’s amazing skills: their unerring sense of story, their painterly eye, their supreme knack for framing an unforgettable story. Over and over, we will hear them be described as geniuses.
There’s just one major topic we won’t hear about: how did they get so good?
The surprising answer is this: they got good by making lots of extremely bad, schlocky movies. Click on the transcendently cheesy 1988 video above — directed by Cameron and starring Bigelow — and enjoy. Should you desire more, here’s a rare clip of Cameron’s first-ever movie, “Xenogenesis.”
We’ve all heard Cameron’s story — the obsessive mastermind behind blockbusters “Terminator” and “Titanic.” However, many biographies omit a vital fact: Cameron spent his early career apprenticing with legendary director/producer Roger Corman, king of the low-budget B movie, who specialized in making entire movies in less than three days. Think about that: script, shots, sets, actors — in 72 hours, a system that created Cameron-helmed classics like “Pirhana II: The Spawning.”
Other Corman apprentices include Martin Scorsese, John Sayles, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Carl Franklin, and a dozen others. (To his credit, Cameron doesn’t downplay the connection, joking that he attended the “Roger Corman School of Film.”)
Kathryn Bigelow, who started out as a painter, followed a similar trajectory, directing “Near Dark,” “Blue Steel,” “The Loveless,” and “Born in Flames.” Nothing great, by a long stretch (though you can make a case for parts of the surfer/bank robber movie “Point Break”). Only after working through acres of subpar material did Bigelow create the artful, thrilling film for which she’s being honored this week. (I saw the movie on Friday, and it’s pretty amazing – I’m rooting for it to win.)
This pattern is not a coincidence. The key is to consider their careers from a neural perspective. While other would-be directors were waiting around for the “Right Project,” Cameron and Bigelow were seizing an opportunity to grow their skill circuits at ferocious speed: to solve problems, tell stories, build sets, run a team, work with actors, puzzle out the architecture of a story, over and over and over.
The lesson here has to do with the way we think. We instinctively separate creative people into categories – artists and non-artists, serious writers and pulp writers. Cameron and Bigelow show us the falseness of this distinction. Churning out schlocky stuff is not to be avoided, but instead to be actively sought out — so long as it doesn’t become an end in itself. We all should have a Roger Corman apprenticeship.
This brings up a question: where else do we see this pattern? Who else’s creative talents were built by cranking out piles of subpar material?
(My first nomination: Charles Dickens, who spent four Corman-esque years as a court reporter, rendering the complex, interwoven, heartbreaking cases – in other words, their characters and plots – into stories.)
Are You In the Zone? Take This Test.
Recently I’ve been talking with a few master coaches about learning velocity — specifically, asking them for tools that will help people locate the “sweet spot” where learning velocity increases. And that spot is pretty sweet. Research shows that changes in practice strategy and attention can improve learning velocity by as much as tenfold.
So here’s the result: five questions to determine whether you are in the zone or not.
1. Can you describe the move you’re trying to learn in five seconds or less?
2. Do you have a precise, HD-quality mental image of yourself performing the desired skill ?
3. Are you making — and fixing — mistakes?
4. Are you varying the speed of the action — slow, super-slow, and fast?
5. Are you zooming in and out, isolating your attention on a small part, then seeing how it fits in the larger picture?
If you can answer “yes” to all five of these questions — as Apolo Ohno does so vividly in this video — then the coaching consensus is that your speedometer is pegged. Congratulations: you are learning at peak velocity.
In essence, the questions revolve around three simple acts: 1) isolating an action; 2) pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, firing and fixing your circuitry; 3) combining individual actions into a fluent performance. And it’s important to note that while athletics is the most obvious application here, these methods apply to music, math, business, social skills — even writing. After all, when it comes to learning skills, neurons are neurons (well, pretty much).
It’s also interesting to note what questions are not on the test. There’s nothing about long-term goals, for instance. Perhaps that’s because when it comes to motivation, long-term goals are essential — but in training they tend to distract from the matter at hand: putting your entire attention toward the act of building fast, fluent circuitry. Also absent from this quiz: any talk of your present level of ability — which is equally immaterial to the process.
With his zone-friendly practice habits, is it any wonder that Ohno performed so well in Dancing With the Stars? And judging by his performance in Vancouver, he’s still firmly in the sweet spot.
And speaking of the sweet spot, I’d like to remind you of the story of Michael Reddick, a regular guy who is attempting to become a professional billiards player. Check out Reddick’s remarkable progress here.
Tiger’s Baby Steps
Check out these rare snapshots from Tiger Woods’s early childhood. (Located in the lobby of the Tiger Woods Center on Nike’s campus in Beaverton, Oregon, where they reside like holy artifacts at the Vatican.)
These photos are good symbols for the skills that Woods is going to spend the next few months trying to learn – the ones he missed out on while he was growing up – the skills of managing emotions and controlling impulses.
Managing emotions and controlling impulses are skills. That’s a strange and surprising thought, but it’s true – they’re neural circuits like any other, and in order to work fluently, they need to be fired over and over again, with intensity. (In a profound sense, that’s what cognitive-behavioral therapy is.)
The Tiger Woods story isn’t just moral — it’s neural. Therapy is Woods’s new driving range: where he will have a chance to build up these puny, underdeveloped skill circuits he should have grown a long time ago: how to treat people, how to build and sustain relationships.
Will it work? Well, Woods is at a disadvantage because he’s working against time (like a golf swing, these skills are developed far more efficiently when you’re younger). He’ll also be working against the reality-warping power of his fame, which colors every interaction with other people. Not to mention the presence of an entire world eager to magnify his every move into a Big Definitive Story.
I think it’s safe to say that Woods will never be as good at navigating emotions as he is at navigating a golf course. But can he put in a few thousand hours of hard work and get good enough?
For now, we can only say one thing: Tiger’s work ethic is going to come in very, very handy.
How to Design a Useful Yardstick
Instant proverb of the day:
You are what you count.
Many of the talent hotbeds I visited for the book don’t rely on conventional performance yardsticks. Instead, they design their own.
The other day I met Graham Walker and Steve Robinson, who coach many of England’s fast-rising crop of junior golfers. Their most important teaching tool? A long piece of rope, which they use to mark off distances for accuracy-improving games they’ve designed. For instance, players make a series of wedge shots from 10, 20, and 30 yards, marking each result on specially designed scorecards.
Or there’s the technique of Pinchas Zuckerman, the great Israeli violinist, whose practice method consisted of a two jars and a bunch of marbles. Each time he played a piece perfectly, Zuckerman transferred a single marble from one jar to the other. When the second jar was full, he was ready.
In both cases, the strategy is the same: to realize that conventional measures (scoreboards, for instance, or hours of practice time) are far too loose and vague, while homemade yardsticks connect to real practice goals — improving accuracy or perfect repetition. All well-designed yardsticks share a few common features:
- Clarity. There are no gray areas; just cool, inarguable, trackable numbers.
- Stretchiness. A well-designed yardstick can accomodate a variety of abilities, and there’s an improvement ladder implicitly built in.
- Ownability. Feedback is direct, not filtered through a higher authority.
It’s not just what you keep track of — it’s also what you don’t keep track of. Unlike virtually every other company in the world, dot-com shoe company Zappos doesn’t keep track of how long its employees talk to each customer. Instead, it actively encourages its employees to spend as much phone time as they need to make their customers happy — even to the point of helping arrange a pizza delivery to a hungry customer. The longest call so far? Four hours.
3 Rules of High-Velocity Learning
A couple weeks from now, when Shaun White wins his medals at the Vancouver Olympics, you’ll want to remember this video. Because here we get a vivid picture of what’s really beneath his unworldly skills — and it’s not merely gallons of Red Bull. Rather, it’s White’s highly organized method of high-velocity learning — a deep-practice technique that lets him accomplish, as he calculates here, “a couple years of riding in one day.”
So courtesy of Professor White, here are a few lessons that might apply to the art of learning and teaching fast, fluent, complex actions — like playing a new song, trading stocks, making a sales pitch, or (a bit closer to home for me) coaching Little Leaguers.
- Lesson 1: Start out with the complete move in your head. As White says, it should play like a movie in your mind. Song, sales pitch, soccer trick, whatever — it should be vivid and in HD.
- Lesson 2: Isolate and compress the key elements. The foam pit is vital, because it allows White to isolate on the moves of the trick itself and not worry about the danger. It allows him the ultimate advantage: to operate in the sweet spot on the edge of his ability; fire circuits, make mistakes, fix them, and fire again (and again, and again) in perfect safety. Danger — whether it’s an icy half-pipe or a live audience — is added last.
- Lesson 3: Work in a stepwise manner, a little bit farther each time, zooming in and out between the whole trick and its elements. Watch how White does part of the trick on the wall, then the whole thing into the pit, then goes back to the wall, then puts it all together. This back-and-forth isn’t random. White is systematically isolating the move’s key elements, then linking them like so many Legos into one fluent circuit. All fluidity is made of Legos in disguise.
(Special thanks to Jeff Albert.)
Will Apple’s iPad Make Us Dumb? (Or Smarter?)
Like many of you, I spent part of yesterday staring curiously at Steve Jobs’s latest creation, and wondering how it might affect my life and my brain.
Certain truths are already clear: this device will make a lot of people more connected, more efficient, and it’ll certainly make them cooler in certain circles. But the real question is this: will it make people smarter? What’s the best way to use new technology to grow our talents?
- Theory 1: It’ll Make Us Dumber
The iPad, is built for three basic purposes: 1) absorbing media (video, books, web); 2) curating our stuff (music, photos); 3) connecting to other people. While these activities might make us more connected, or more deft organizers, the basic truth is that we don’t learn best by passively browsing media. To grow high-speed neural circuitry we need action — we need to fire the circuit, make mistakes, fix those mistakes, and repeat.
This is why studies have found that immersing our brains in the Internet diminishes certain aspects of intelligence (see Why Google is Making us Stoopid). It’s also why some schools that had previously introduced laptops in the classroom have now decided to get rid of them, because they diminish test scores.
Here’s why: the Internet is a warm bath of information and entertainment — and warm baths, while they feel fantastic, are an absolutely terrible way to built high-speed neural circuits. (How do you think Apple’s famously obsessive design team got to be skilled enough to produce the iPad? Hint: it wasn’t a warm bath.)
By this way of thinking, the real danger of the iPad is that it will be a time-thief. It is so incredibly delightful, personal, and obedient that it’s the ultimate warm neural bath; the comfort zone we never want to leave.
- Theory 2: It’ll Make Us Smarter
Sure, whiz-bang new technology always gives us new ways to waste spectacular amounts of time and energy. But it also gives us new and immersive ways to grow our skill circuits. Meet Exhibit A: Magnus Carlsen.
Carlsen is a youngest chess player ever to achieve a number-one ranking. (He was just profiled in Time magazine.) He is the first of a generation who’ve trained almost exclusively through computer chess (when asked if he owned a chessboard, Carlsen said he wasn’t sure). Carlsen has played and analyzed millions of games, and used that deep practice to develop an uncanny intuition that leaves older grandmasters speechless. As Jonah Lehrer puts it in his insightful blog entry:
“And this is why we shouldn’t be surprised that a chess prodigy raised on chess computer programs would be even more intuitive than traditional grandmasters. The software allows [Carlsen] to play more chess, which allows him to make more mistakes, which allows him to accumulate experience at a prodigious pace.”
Exhibit B would be Mark Sanchez, Joe Flacco, Matt Ryan, and other successful young NFL quarterbacks who’ve developed their skills by playing Madden NFL videogames. As Chris Suellentrop’s great story in Wired magazine shows, this generation is the first to have come up playing thousands of simulated games–recognizing defenses, selecting plays, spotting blitzes. As Suellentrop writes,
“[Playing Madden] isn’t just an exercise in self-obsession. Whether they know it or not, these athletes may actually be strengthening their brains. Cognitive scientists have published a series of studies demonstrating that playing fast-paced action videogames — mostly first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Halo — can alter “some of the fundamental aspects of visual attention,” as a paper published in the July 2009 issue of Neuropsychologia put it. By training on these games, researchers found, nongamers can achieve faster reaction time, improved hand-eye coordination, and greatly increased ability to process multiple stimuli.”
He goes on to cite studies that shows video gaming has been linked to improvements in the skills of surgeons and military pilots; the same dynamic accounts for the success of certain language software programs that combine vivid simulations with real-time feedback.
The overarching lesson here seems to be that growing skills depends on what you do with the device, not what the device does for you. Immersive simulations — which provide space to do things, fire circuits, make mistakes, and which provide vivid, immediate feedback — are by far the best way to learn certain kinds of skills.
All this leaves me imagining the next level in talent-building technology — to provide interactive access to the true magical software, the mind of a master coach. I’d love to see a quick, seamless way to video-link to a master coach anywhere in the world for a lesson. You would throw a ball, or swing a club, or play a song, and they would give you real-time feedback. Can you imagine?
The Science of the Hot Streak
For the last couple weeks, many of my NY friends have been extremely psyched about their Amazin’ Jets: a run-of-the-mill NFL team that suddenly, mysteriously started beating more talented teams, and which now stands one victory away from reaching the promised land of the Super Bowl.
It’s a great story, because we can relate. We’ve all been part of groups, in school or sports or business or music, that suddenly inhabit some magical zone of high performance — and then just as suddenly fall out of it. The deeper questions are: what causes this to happen? How can we make it happen more often?
I think part of the answer might be found in an unexpected place: a small, messy room on West 56th St. That’s where, from 1950 to 1954, a motley group of young comedy writers gathered to write the television program “Your Show of Shows.”
Each week, the writers (Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Mel Tolkin, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart–talk about a talent hotbed) invented an entire show from scratch. By various accounts, the pattern was always the same: Monday, hardly anything got done. Tuesday, a little bit, but not that much. By Wednesday, things started rolling — in part because cameras had to be set up. Thursday and Friday were insanely productive – which was good, because Saturday night their inventions were beamed live nationwide for 90 minutes. Every week the pattern was the same: the writers started slow, then (suddenly, miraculously) hit on a hot streak. Their work, so unpromising on Monday, became brilliantly funny by Saturday night.
I think there’s a useful connection between the Jets’ hot streak and those insanely productive days on West 56th St. — and not just because comedy and football are so similar (collaborative, complex, relying on precise timing). But rather because both are beautiful examples of how to build a deep-practice hothouse; a place that combines intensive learning with an urgent set of emotional cues. Three common elements jump out:
1) Super-high goals, from the start. On his first day, to the open-mouthed disbelief of media and fans alike, new Jets coach Rex Ryan talked about how the team would be visiting the White House after winning the Super Bowl. The West 56th St. writers set their goals even higher. As Mel Brooks said, “It wasn’t only a competition to be funnier. I had to get to the ultimate punch line. I was immensely ambitious. It was like I was screaming at the universe, like I had to make God laugh.”
2) Strong shared identity. It’s no coincidence that Coach Ryan and Sid Caesar resemble each other in personality; or that they have created teams in the images of themselves — tough, sharp, provocative, funny as hell. Because they’re not just building a team — they’re creating a story.
3) Early failure is not a verdict, but a navigation point for better work. The Jets went through a tough patch early in the season, much like the Monday-Tuesday doldrums on West 56th. The bad days weren’t the end; they turned out to be stepping stones.
Of course, that’s not to say that doing these things is any kind of guarantee. Hot streaks are mysterious because they always depend on factors beyond our control. Truth is, the Jets could easily have lost to the Chargers last week; truth is, “Your Show of Shows” was sometimes hilarious, sometimes not so much. But the deeper truth is, both caught a hot streak because they had build a structure to do so.
Side note: There’s an interesting school of thought that holds that hot streaks don’t actually exist. Several studies have found that what we see as hot streaks is really just our narrative-hungry brains superimposing a story on a random run of luck. But I’d like to point out that most of these studies involve coin flips, NBA scorers, and MLB batters — highly compartmentalized, either/or scenarios that don’t resemble the complex, emotional group interactions we find in football, comedy writing, and, I’d argue, our everyday lives.
Family Talent
The Nuge's Brother
The Nuge
A few years back I was eating dinner with Ted Nugent (for this Outside magazine story). The Nuge was on a roll — you know, shredding on his guitar, raging against The Man — until midway through our venison steaks he lets drop a little family fact. His brother, Jeff, happens to be a successful businessman. In fact, he was CEO of Neutrogena (now CEO of Revlon).
I thought Nugent was pulling my leg. But in fact it turned out to be true.
While it’s relatively common to find siblings who are talented at the same skill (Venus/Serena Williams; the chess-playing Polgar sisters, the skiing Mahre twins, the Jackson/Osmond/Gibb singing dynasties, etc.). It’s quite another — and perhaps worth exploring — how a single family can produce two unique and diverse talents.
Because the Nugents aren’t the only ones who follow this pattern. Consider Irving and Arthur Penn — one a great photographer; the other an Oscar-winning film director. Then there’s William and Henry James (psychologist/philosopher and writer), and more recently brother and sister Maile Meloy (fiction writer) and Colin Meloy (songwriter and lead singer of The Decemberists. On a personal scale, I can think of a handful of familie, including the Putnams, a brother and sister who were my childhood neighbors in Anchorage, who grew up to be a successful filmmaker and a Sports Illustrated writer.
So what accounts for this pattern? To put it more concisely, what makes these remarkable families tick?
I think the first thing to point out is that the talents in question aren’t quite as diverse they first appear. Look closer at the Nuge and you’ll find an incredibly disciplined, calculated, message-conscious, ambitious entrepreneur — perhaps not as unlike his buttoned-down brother as you might suspect. The same deeper connection exists with the James brothers (pioneering thinkers), the Penns (visual artists), and the Meloys (creative types). It’s not like one sibling is an Olympic sprinter and the other an impressionist painter. (Though if anybody knows of an example like that, I’d be curious.)
If we think about talent as a neural circuit requiring practice and motivation, this pattern makes sense. Siblings usually share a common identity that can fuel motivation, especially when there’s some competition. The shared environment helps those talents along exactly as it does in the case of the Williams sisters or the Brontes: they are motivated to deeply practice in that area.
These families also help underline the importance of what we might call meta-skills — the larger qualities that form the foundation for all high performance: qualities like self-control, focus, ability to project toward a goal. As a neurologist might point out, these are also neural circuits; they’re also partly a result of the shared family environment. We could theorize that these families are examples of a kind of hothouse effect, where kids with a shared identity have a tendency to develop meta-skills in certain areas. Then they diverge, as siblings tend to do, into their own narrower areas of expertise.
That’s kind of what happened in my family. I’ve got an older brother who’s a writer/editor and a younger brother who’s a doctor, and I’m in between — a guy who came very close to going to med school (even took the MCATs) but who ended up writing. We three brothers are different in many ways, but underneath we share the same way of looking at the world, analyzing it to see the underlying patterns, the same work habits — the same meta-skills, you might say, along with obviously much of the same identity.
To be fair, someone else could look at this pattern and see it as evidence for some talent gene that predestined the Nugents, Osmonds, et. al. It’s tempting to see it this way — and in fact Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, along with his modern successors, tried for years to prove that such a gene or gene combination exists. But they haven’t had much luck. Because the fact is, there is no gene for family talent because it simply takes too much deep practice, time, and motivation to build fast, fluent neural circuits.
And besides, if family talent was all about genes, how in the world would we explain Jermaine Jackson?
(I’d like to send special thanks to Bill Forward for bringing this to my attention–and who wisely suggests adding another sibling duo: Rahm and Ari Emanuel.)
Seeing Beneath Greatness
In a couple hours my son and I are going to see the Chosen One: Mr. LeBron Raymone James, live and in person, on his 25th birthday (Cleveland Cavaliers versus Atlanta Hawks). We’ll be sitting in the rafters, but we’re excited to see Him in action. After all, it isn’t often you get to see a guy who makes the world’s best basketballers look like helpless kids.
But what will we be seeing, really? Fast, fluent neural circuits James built through deep practice? God-given talents? How can we see beneath the performance, to the forces that created it?
I was thinking of these questions when I came across this video of an 11-year-old from Washington who’s supposed to be the Next LeBron. His name is JaShaun Agosto, and here’s what he can do:
It’s pretty dazzling. But here’s the kicker: JaShaun’s daily four-hour workout consists of the following:
- mile run
- 50 free throws without missing
- half hour of layup drills
- 250 jumpers without missing three in a row
- ten different dribbling drills (some using two basketballs)
- 200 push-ups
- 200 sit-ups
- 150 squat-thrusts
Many of you have probably heard about the new “virtual reality” software. Basically, you aim your iPhone camera at something in the real world — a shop, a restaurant — and up pops pertinent information, such as price or user ratings.
So here’s my impossible game-day wish: I wish that someone would invent a virtual-reality app for famous athletes. Here’s how it would work: we’d aim our iPhone at a Roger Federer or LeBron, and up would pop the number of hours they train, or a sample of their daily workout. It’d work equally well with famous musicians (what would the numbers show on Lady GaGa, I wonder?). Because behind every great performance is hidden a great practice routine.
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